Online PR UK & Expert SEO

This useful diagram explains how search engines see keywords…

(I would love to take credit for this excellent diagram - but that goes to webmasterworld and one of its contributors.)

As you can see, the more specific the search, the more likely you are to have relevant content for your user. So when you build a site and plan content, its worth planning your site as groupings of subjects with ‘weightings’ of keywords allocated to different pages.

This way you are allowing search engines to catalogue your site more logically and that will end up producing higher rankings.

an example of what im talking about

you have a site called widgets.com
the home page is about widgets

there are 4 main topics on widgets, an deach of those have a page assigned to them

• widget extraction,
• widget placement
• widget location
• widget maintanance

Each of these pages focus on their given topic, so widget extraction will obviously centre on all to do with getting widgets out of the ground, or whereever they come from. This page might have 4 sub topics like:

• widget ground extraction
• widget water extraction
• widget air extraction
• widget space extraction

And of course we can go even further…

• widget ground extraction by water
• widget ground extraction by machine
• widget ground extraction by hand
• widget ground extraction by dynamite

and on it goes… you get the idea.

So as you see you get a pyramid effect and if i wanted to know about widget ground extraction using dynamite - I expect I would land up on your page, after all it is the most relevant page on this subject !
Whilst this is only one componant of many in SEO, its definately one of the most significant - I say this because ‘relevancy’ is the most important mission for a search engine in terms of positive user experience and those who build sites around this strategy will see their rewards in the rankings!

Things search engines cannot deal with:

• Flash (Adobe/Macromedia)
• Java and Javascript
• text in images

Are you planning a site where the important content is embedded in any of the above? If you are, then re think your project! Google, MSN, Yahoo and all the engines have great trouble dealing with this. SO STOP NOW if you are planning an ‘all flash site’ or Java driven one.

To see what a search engine sees, use this tool: http://www.seo-browser.com/. It shows you a text only version of a site. Take 2 sites, a badly optimised one and a well optimised one.

Bad SEO: Click the movie | Original Site (Obviously they dont need to be seen widely on the search engines, only for core keywords like ‘click’ where they do well.

Good SEO : Guess where you are!

I have collected a group of really useful tools that I use almost every single day.

See on the menu on the left.

This toolkit is by no means a finished list, I’m always finding new tools to work with the help my search engine optimization and search engine promotional work.

I have catalogued each of the tools by the type of job I need to do, that’s why some tools overlap with different types of task. The odd thing about these tools are that they are most often free despite their great usefullness. There are web sites that stand out, one of them is www.webconfs.com which has a great selection of SEO and SEP web tools.

On balance I think the most useful combination is the key word density cloud and the global and sense tester mixed with the clusty keyword cloud tool. This is because it helps you determine the correct theme for the web page that you’re working on and if you want to be seen by search engines correct theme is very important .

Adsense tool: http://www.acmetech.com/

Clusty Keyword Cloud: http://cloud.clusty.com/

Keyword Cloud: http://www.webconfs.com/

What a simple idea! make the tabs on firefox colorful so you can quickly work out which tab is which at a glance.

It has saved me loads of “brain time” because intuitively  I know where everything is at a glance.

You can get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1368/ 

Notice a familiar sentiment…… 

I have been doing a lot of research recently on inbound linking and linkbait - i.e. getting links from the RIGHT sites and making sure the content on those sites is right for getting linked to.

Obviously the right content is something you want to return to in the future, perhaps its reference material, or a commentry on something. there is a caviat.. the content needs to follow a theme - hrence thsi latent symantec stuff i have been talking about

but what about this promenence stuff ? well here is the concept:

a website needs inbound links becasue they are a vote of confidence from 3rd parties saying ‘this is a good site’ - engines rely on this becasue its  human powered filter and so almost by definition its the best way forward when it comes to filtering out sites whicih himand are not interested in.

no links = no interest

of course you need to have filters on ths inbound links otherwise you will get spam links, these spam links still work on MSN and to an extent on yahoo, but not so much on Google.

anyhow, the concept of prominence… simply lots of great inbound links = loads of promenence + content hirarchy + theme = high rankings

so when I talk of search engein prominence, i mean the stuff that gets your stuff up the rankings. Optimisation gets you on the starting line - prominence, gets you the visability.